Our customers look to us for information or advice on a variety of business problems. We enjoy the challenges, and some really get me thinking about software design and making things easier for the users. Case in point:
Dozens of giant 3-ring binders full of paper manuals. Let's scan them into the computer and make them all searchable from a single place.
A casino customer brought this problem and a possible solution to us and asked what I thought. One solution they found is through a company called ABBYY — they make software for converting document formats, including from PDF to Word and Text and Back and Forth — AND scanning paper documents and images, using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology to render the text into REAL text, not just an image of text.
So, OCR technology reads the text from that image and makes it be like real, normal, text.
Anyway, OCR is in use by dozens of software companies. It's not a 'standard', it's just the name of the technology — you teach the computer to optically recognize text in an image and then write it down in a normal text document format for you. (An aside: License Plate reading cameras and DVRs use a form of OCR to read the letters and numbers on a license plate.)
So, here's my review for that customer and for you:
ABBYY makes great software. I use their PDF-to-Word program with OCR to get badly written image-only PDFs into a document I can work with. However, their document scanning with OCR is no better than the OCR built into Microsoft Office 2007 — That's right! If you already have MS Office 2003 or 2007, you already have document scanning and OCR technology built right in. Just go get a scanner that works with your computer, and use the Microsoft Document Imaging program in MS Office.
Problems:
NO OCR I've ever seen is 100% accurate. You have to at least spell-check, if not actually read the doc for errors.
It takes time, even with the fastest scanners, to get paper documents scanned into your computer.
Scanned images are LARGE — you need LOTS of hard drive space to scan dozens of even black-and-white 3-ring binders full of paper.
Results:
In the end, you have searchable documents online that used to take up shelf space and kill trees. It CAN work, but it's not effortless. It would almost be worth it to find a SERVICE that does this for you!
A Final Note:
Airship User Guide and System Integrator Guide is already always available online, in a searchable format. It's called A WEBSITE! And the entire content of the help files are inside the Airship Server and Client applications, too!
Gryphon MacThoy
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